constellations #97: liminal august

Hi again,

The other day I saw a tweet that said, essentially, that the month of August is a liminal space, which seems to me true and right: the height of summer quickly passing, the slow descent of fall not quite yet begun. Does this all sound familiar? “The internet loves to call everything ‘liminal’ now,” I wrote back in [checks notes] 2021, which: fair. Still, I’ve spent so much time this month sweating in traffic, my car’s AC busted; planning around rain that never came; holding my breath with nerves. Writing and then waiting for inspiration or for edits or for something to publish. Reading nothing as I got stuck between library loans. One night I went to sleep early then woke up at 1:55 a.m. to watch the Olympic women’s marathon on TV. I know this is supposed to be, famously, the city that never sleeps but my block was so quiet and my partner was asleep in bed and I felt absurd on my couch, cheering at a screen, but it was a remarkable race, and I was glad to be awake in the liminal twilight to see it unfold.

I first heard that term, “liminal,” during my sophomore year of college, in my Anthropological Theory class. We met every Thursday morning, ungodly early, at the top of a tower in an old stone building. We read Marx and Geertz and Boas and Mead and Benedict and Malinowski and Said and Bourdieu—my first time encountering basically all of these writers, and many more. I had just declared an anthropology major and knew that speedrunning the great thinkers of the discipline would be essential. But when I think back on it, I mostly remember being overwhelmed, my mind expanding so fast as I tried to keep up with the sheer volume of ways of seeing the world.

Anyway, we also read Victor Turner, who didn’t invent the concept of liminality but focused much of his ethnographic work on it. He was especially interested in rites of passage—as was his predecessor, Arnold van Gennep, who coined the term “liminal”—and how they influence social relations. In a rite of passage, we act in ways that are not otherwise socially sanctioned, often in ways that upend entrenched social hierarchies. (Turner argued that, because of this, rituals are a means of reinforcing social equality—that they remind us of our shared humanity.) We are briefly freed from existing codes of behavior and this allows us to become, in the eyes of our culture, someone else. That midpoint of the rite of passage—when we are no longer who we were before, and not yet who we are becoming—is what is meant, anthropologically, by liminality.

I guess when I put my sophomore-year-of-college lenses on my internet-fried 2024 brain, my definition of a liminal August does not quite hold up. Victor Turner was not thinking of me on I-95 getting dehydrated in my Subaru, or yelling at the TV at 4 a.m., or whatever. Or, what I mean is: I don’t sense a great transformation coming at the end of this month; I don’t expect to be, for better or worse, someone else.

Maybe all I mean is this, the way the writer Haley Mlotek put it: “There is something off about August.” It’s been a strange and hectic month, and my brain is on summer vacation, and I’ll be back with a full essay (or whatever) next month. In the meantime here are a few personal updates:

• I recently started working as a contributing editor at Pitchfork, and will be there for the next few months. I really love editing and I’m so happy to be doing it on a regular basis again. (And for such a beloved publication! Profoundly grateful.)

• For Dirt, I interviewed the writer Charlotte Shane about her new book, An Honest Woman. Charlotte’s work has been a guiding light for me and it was delightful to talk to her about intimacy and heteropessimism and writing.

• I have a couple contributions in the forthcoming book How Women Made Music, which is based on an NPR Music project called Turning the Tables. The book also includes contributions from many of the smartest, sharpest music journalists working today, plus material from NPR’s archives. I have a galley sitting beside me as I write this, and it’s really lovely! The book is out on Oct. 1, but you can pre-order it now, and you should.

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Oh, Mary! on Broadway—laughed until I cried; Cusp live at Samsara; really good vegan food at Modern Love; sandwiches from Lioni in Sunset Park; the album Wild Things Run Fast by Joni Mitchell, because I love the way Ann Powers writes about it in her Joni biography Traveling; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Worry by Alexandra Tanner; a gorgeous photo book from my friend Chris Mongeau; The Departed and Bring It On— both for the first time, both great; this list of Sopranos malapropisms; the Falmouth Road Race, my favorite day of the year; a candy salad with contributions from a bunch of friends, which we ate & added to over the course of a beachside week we spent together; my friend Courtney’s recent newsletter, which coincidentally is also about personal rituals and, in a way, anthropology; an amazing set with Gnarly Rae Jepsen (the Carly Rae Jepsen cover band I am in) as part of Korchfest at the Black Cat

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This time last year I was: consuming; and before that, crying and appreciating ambivalence

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Thanks for reading. Is a grand transformation coming next month? If you hope so, I hope so, too.

xo,
M